innocent bystanders getting run over on my watch. Agony fled my bones, chased out by fury, and I smashed through sickness to call up the healing magic that was my heritage. I had no idea what I was up against, but that’d never stopped me before. Better to turn myself into a super-size McSnack for gray ooze than to let anybody else get eaten.
Silver power surged, its brilliant blue highlights making me feel like an electrical conduit. I could See it, blazing with righteous anger, and while I still couldn’t hear much beyond Billy’s shout, I’m pretty sure that was when the stampede started. Anybody in their right mind wanted to get the hell away from me. For a room as crowded as that one, it was amazing how everybody managed to jump back two feet and leave a circle of emptiness around me.
At least, I thought it was them lurching back. I had a certain amount of success with the idea of capturing things in nets, but a net wasn’t going to hold goop in. I went the bubble-boy route, sending a physical flare of magic from my core into a sphere around me. It was wholly possible that I shoved everybody out of my way, although I didn’t think that was very polite and shamany. Then again, a dead shaman had told me I’d walk a warrior’s path, so maybe I had license to metaphysically bludgeon people once in a while.
Either way, they were a bit farther out of harm’s way, and the cauldron-born ichor ran up against my sphere and began crawling upward, looking for egress and finding none. I figured it would take about two seconds before it reached the top and started dripping down on me. That meant I had about a second and a half to come up with a brilliant plan to stop it.
Time resumed its normal pace, two seconds blew by, and I was screwed.
There’s nothing especially attractive about shrieking like a little kid and curling up in a ball with your hands over your head, but that’s what I did. I didn’t want to face that skin-peeling sensation again. Even the idea made my eyes hot with tears, and if falling down and sobbing kept it away from me for another half second, I wasn’t too proud to grovel.
More than that went by before I realized my skin wasn’t being pulled off. I peeked through my fingers at the shell I’d built around myself and the cauldron.
Man. I had no idea what it looked like from the outside, but from within, it looked like a Gaussian blur of hell. Formless gray surged and slid around me, a relentless ocean of potential danger and pain. Color bled in, but only at the corners of my eyes: if I jerked to look straight on at it, red and black faded away, as if something living didn’t want to meet my gaze. Thin, bonelike hooks scratched at my arms and flinched back again. A sound crept in behind the small bones of my ears, something high and lost that reminded me of the banshee.
It made shapes out of the mist, emaciated wavering things with gaping eyes and mouths. They had the weight of age to them, pressing down on me as if, if they couldn’t scrape their way in through my skin, they’d crush me into component parts that could be absorbed into the gray.
A little belatedly, it occurred to me to wonder why they weren’t scraping their way inside my skin, and I stopped peeking through my hands to look at my fingers.
Seeing through your own skin is a bizarre effect. When my magic had first broken loose, there’d been so much to burn off I’d seen my flesh and blood as rainbows, shimmering with power. Over time that variety had faded to the silver and blue that I now considered to be mine, and right now that was what I saw: oil-slick pools of color burning in my veins and swimming through my muscles. All that magic had once been knotted up under my breastbone, making me sick with the need to act, but it’d become a much more integral part of me, almost always active to some degree, and ready to be called on in its full strength when I needed it.
Offhand, I guessed the gray slime wasn’t down with shamanic power, and that a human body rife with it wasn’t an appealing host. It had likely dared to attack me in the first place because I hadn’t called my power up actively: now that I’d turned it on, I was unfriendly territory. That suggested I was probably dealing with some kind of death magic, because while shamanism had as much to do with death as life, I was coming to think of it as a more or less inherently life-positive kind of magic. Though if I found myself using phrases like life-positive very often I was going to have to life-negative myself out of humiliation. Nobody says things like that. Jeez.
The point, though, was that if the nasty gray slime couldn’t get a foothold in me when I was topped up with blue glowy lifey goodness, then it probably had a big fat hold on death itself. In fact, me being a poor host was, in every aspect but one, excellent. It meant the bubble of power would keep the stuff in, and that I’d be perfectly safe as long as I could maintain it.
And therein lay the flaw. I’d been in the midst of a hideous gray blur for less than a minute and I was already eager to get out. I still didn’t have any idea how. This kind of thing wasn’t covered in the shamanic handbook. In fact, nobody’d given me a handbook, an oversight I felt was increasingly gross as I stumbled along this path.
Well, said a little voice inside my head, you might not know how to get out, but you don’t actually have to be stuck in the gray, you know.
I hated that voice. It sounded just like me being sarcastic, which was bad enough, but it also usually had a very good point, which only added insult to injury. I was pretty sure everybody had a voice that made snide comments and that I’d had one before my world went magical and mystical, but I couldn’t remember for sure. I was afraid to ask anybody else in case they said no. Being a shaman was challenging enough. Being an actually insane shaman would just suck.
Teeth clenched against mumbling imprecations at a voice in my head, I let go of the Sight so I could, well, see.
Only when the gray faded did I realize how weird it was I hadn’t been able to See beyond it. Usually the Sight gave me layers upon layers: I’d looked through half of Seattle in the past, buildings becoming strong semi-visible constructs of pride and place, things that knew what they were meant to do and glad to do it. People were brilliant spots of color, and highways black-and-blue jagged smears across a natural landscape. Other living things, trees particularly, were incredible with their light, but none of it blocked each other out like the gray film had done. I’d really only encountered something like that once, when a demi-god was trying to hide his exact location from me. It’d worked, and if that meant the cauldron was pouring cranky demi-gods out into my Halloween party I was going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with the management. Never mind that I had no idea who or what might constitute The Management in the complex spiritual world I’d been introduced to. I’d complain to it anyway. No fear, that’s me.
No fear, or no sense. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
My sphere glimmered at a diameter too great for me to touch with spread arms. Even without the Sight it was visible to me, and by the way people were scurrying for the doors, I guessed they could see it, too. I had to look bizarre, wearing that ridiculous costume and crouched in the midst of a shimmering ball of light.
Actually, I thought I might look kind of awesomely dramatic and theatrical, at least if I wasn’t cowering. I straightened my shoulders, lifted my chin and put my fingertips against the cauldron’s platform floor. I had no idea what other people thought, but it gave me an absurd burst of confidence, and an idiotic smile bloomed across my face. If that’s what being an action hero feels like, sign me up.
Most everybody around me was moving away. From my action-hero pose I saw Thor and Phoebe holding their ground, though Phoebe’s jaw was dropped and she held her quarterstaff as if she wanted to use it. I wished my sword wasn’t peace knotted, then wished it was real, then felt a chill rush over my skin and knew that if I needed a blade to fight the mist, I’d have one. I’d earned or been given all the elements that made up sword and shield and armor, and even if I wasn’t carrying
